Atlantis is a word processor from Rising Sun Solutions. It has not achieved similar popularity as Microsoft Word/Microsoft Office or the free OpenOffice.org, but being powerful, reliable, quick and easy to use it definitely deserves to be better known.
Atlantis can open and save documents as RTF (rich text format, the standard for word processing), Microsoft Word documents (including DOCX), 256-bit encrypted documents (COD) and as of recently also OpenOffice Writer (ODF) documents. It can also save documents as web pages (HTML) and as eBooks (EPUB format).
Atlantis is shareware, which means it can be tried out for free, but those who continue using it after 30 days must register. The registration costs $35.
Benefits of Atlantis
- Highly reliable
- Extremely fast
- Low consumption of system resources
- Can be downloaded and tried out for free
- Multiple documents open in the same window using tabs
- Not vulnerable to macro viruses or other exploits
- Easy to use, clean and powerful interface
- Highly customizable
- Excellent customer support
- Useful features missing from Microsoft Word and other competitors
- Does not need to be installed
The ability to keep multiple documents open in the same window (similar to tabbed browsing in Firefox and Opera) is very useful and quickly becomes indispensible for a writer. Even better, Atlantis automatically saves the workspace (and the documents), so if the program is closed or there is a computer crash, work can quickly resume.
The speed and performance of Atlantis are unsurpassable. It does not consume much RAM even with many large documents open at once, so it can be used on older PCs as well. Atlantis does not even need to be installed, so it can be run straight from a memory stick.
The reliability of Atlantis is impressive: this writer has been using it daily for over eight years and has never experienced a crash or data corruption. The free customer support offered through email has proven to be professional and speedy.
Useful Features in Atlantis
Atlantis supports all the usual word processing features, such as fields, columns, headers, footers, page numbering, endnotes, footnotes, sections and images. Professional writers are happy to find out that the Word Count feature is smoother to use than in many word processors and can be integrated to the status bar, as well. There are many tools that make it easier to format documents.
Atlantis has a pleasant clean interface, which is instantly easy to use for anyone who has ever used Microsoft Word or another word processor. There are many keyboard shortcuts and the toolbars are customizeable. Pressing Ctrl twice in a row switches to another set of toolbars, which quickly becomes a very handy tool.
Atlantis comes with an English spellchecker. Additional languages from Portuguese to Finnish can be installed from the website. It also has AutoCorrect, Hyphenation, and Overused Words tools, as well as a handy tool called PowerType. Atlantis can also be integrated with a free tool called WordWeb Thesaurus.
Atlantis Nova - a Free Word Processor
There is also a free version of Atlantis called Atlantis Nova with somewhat reduced features, which can be used indefinitely without registration. Atlantis Nova is an excellent alternative for people who do not require a full-featured word processor. It only takes a megabyte of disk space, but has many useful features.
Downsides of Atlantis Word Processor
Currently both Atlantis and Atlantis Nova are only available for Windows operating systems, not Linux or Mac OS X. However, Atlantis can be run on Linux using Wine.
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